Understanding relationships among agro-ecosystem services based on emergy analysis in Luancheng County, North China

Abstract

Exploring the relationship between different services has become the focus of ecosystem services research in recent years. The agro-ecosystem, which accounts for one-third of the global land area, provides lots of services but also disservices, depending on resources provided by other systems. In this paper, we explored the agro-ecosystem from four aspects: a summary of different indicators in the agro-ecosystem, input and output changes with time, relationships between different ecosystem services and disservices, and resource contribution to major services, using Luancheng County of North China as the study area. We then used emergy analysis to unify all the indicators. The conclusions were that the agro-ecosystem maintained provisioning and regulating services but with increasing volatility under continued growth in production inputs and disservice outputs. There was a positive correlation between most of the different services and disservices. Rainfall and groundwater resources were the most used input resources in the agro-ecosystem and all other major ecosystem services depended directly on them.